History's Publics

Does the American public really care about history? Apparently Americans care about the past in profound and often profoundly personal ways, but most admit little use for professional historians. These two books help explain our divided intellectual world. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen sought public comment on activities that encourage people to think about the past, and they have some suggestions for historians who would like their work to reach larger audiences. Steven Conn uses the history of American museums to help explain how our intellectual world is sometimes marked by such deep differences between professionals at work in the academy and the people they would address.

Backed by grants from the Indiana Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities, professors Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen went looking for Americans who care about the past. Despite conventional wisdom that the United States is inhabited by men and women with a diminished sense of history, Rosenzweig and Thelen had little trouble discovering hundreds of popular history makers. The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life reports the findings of their study. They hired a team of talented surveyors who called 1,453 Americans and got them stay on the phone long enough to answer questions designed to expose their deep feelings about the past. Even though few of those surveyed admitted to liking history class, most still found ways to think about the past.

Rosenzweig and Thelen designed their survey to gather information from people of varied class, region, racial, and ethnic backgrounds. Background, however, did not determine responses precisely as they expected. “Social class, regional identity, political conviction, and ethnicity among whites were much less important in shaping respondents’ understanding of the past than race (particularly for blacks and Indians) and religion (particularly for evangelicals of all kinds)” (p. 10). While Indians, African Americans, and evangelical Christians enhanced feelings of community as they explored experiences of the past, white Americans often turned to the past hoping to bolster personal and family identity.

So personal a sense of the past, Rosenzweig and Thelen conclude, likely offers little comfort either to conservatives or to liberals. To the distress of conservatives, respondents rarely referred to the grand patriotic narratives of the nation’s past. But, they conclude, “liberals and leftists (especially historians)” may be distressed to learn that “when Americans think and talk about the past, many of them avoid collective frameworks like ethnicity, class, region, and gender—categories close to the hearts of professional history practitioners” (p. 116).

While Rosenzweig and Thelen’s evidence on personal interest in the past is strong, it is possible that surveyors unwittingly steered respondents toward just the kinds of personal responses that trouble them. Imagine answering the phone and hearing someone say, “We’re conducting a nationwide study funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to find out how people understand and use the past in their everyday lives.” Rosenzweig and Thelen explain that they chose to ask about “the past,” rather than history, heritage, or tradition, because “the past” was “the most accessible term—one that left respondents with the greatest latitude to describe their engagements on their own terms” (p. 211). This broad invitation to talk about the past seems to have elicited personal stories from respondents, and surveyors surely responded warmly to the family stories people began to tell. After all, they had called people at home and, if my own experience with telephone solicitors is at all representative, in the middle of dinner. They would likely have gotten a cooler reception with questions that recalled the schoolroom.

If latitude encouraged personal responses, so too did the introduction of “everyday life.” By nature, everyday lives are modest things, so cluttered with the personal and the mundane that traces of grand narratives...